Chelsea Winter gave us the 'lockdown loaf', now she shares her easy chocolate cake recipe

With yeast disappearing off shelves up and down the country as people stocked up for the coronavirus lockdown, many are turning to alternative baking recipes that don't require that precious ingredient.

One recipe, in particular, got a lot of shares on social media - Winter's beer bread, which she renamed "lockdown loaf".

A post shared by chelseawinter (@chelseawinter) on Mar 27, 2020 at 8:34pm PDT

She encouraged Kiwis with more time on their hands to go online and try something they haven't cooked before, especially if they were getting bored of their own cooking and the fact Kiwis couldn't order takeaways.

Curries were easy as people generally already had everything in the pantry like coconut cream, garlic, oinion and spices.

"Just have fun, you've got all this time. You might as just be cooking and experimenting, and trying delicious new things."

The cookbook author told the Herald yesterday that hundreds of thousands of people visited the lockdown loaf recipe on her website over the last few days, "from all over the world, not just New Zealand".

"I'm just so stoked because I've always been about empowering people in the kitchen - that's why I write recipes in the first place and why people enjoy cooking them. And it just feels like there's never been as much need for that as right now, in a general sense it's a time where most people are feeling so completely disempowered.

"The fact that suddenly they can suddenly make their own bloody good bread using just a few ingredients, it's like 'hey, stick that in your pipe and smoke it, virus. We're okay, and you can't take our fresh bread away from us'.

"I have received so many hundreds of photos of people's bread I haven't a hope of replying to them all, and usually I try to! But I absolutely love seeing them all.

"Use the crappiest beer you have on hand – that awkward, long-forgotten bottle lurking forlornly the back of the fridge, probably left over from some BYO you had 18 months ago, the one that could be expired and certainly no one will touch, not even your teenage son's half-cut mates. That's the beer you want."

Winter says she will share "quite a few more recipes" over the lockdown period to ensure people can continue to create comfort food with what they have in the pantry.

These were recipes that were going to wait until the release of her new book next year but she feels the time is right to release them now.

"I know people need them now, so I won't make them wait. I'm so excited about it! The next one is going to be a doozy, keep an eye on Facebook and Insta for it."

This article was first published on the NZ Herald and is republished here with permission.